Numerous Western India-watchers, Delhi correspondents and
other "experts" have been warning for many years that a BJP government
would be a terrible thing, as this was a "fascist" party. Today, it is
possible to separate the sincere and conscientious experts from the
others, by a very simple criterion: has he or she compared the actual
performance of the BJP government with these dire predictions? Or in
practical terms: has he or she apologized to the readers or viewers for
misinforming them all this while?

For indeed, the prediction of BJP "fascism" has fallen
flat on its face, as will be clear from a brief survey of the defining
elements of "fascism" and how they relate to Indian reality. For starters,
fascists are reputed to be violent. It was predicted that communal
violence would increase a hundredfold if the BJP were allowed to come to
power. In reality, the BJP term in power has been the most peaceful year
since decades. Even in Jammu and Kashmir, Islamic killings of Hindus have
markedly decreased. That terrorists killed twenty Hindus in Jammu (an
incident that went strictly unreported in the Western media) on the eve of
Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee's peace mission to Pakistan is first
of all the responsibility of the killers themselves, even if not
preventing this massacre was secondarily also a failure of the security
forces. Note that most of the victims of the remaining communal violence
were Hindus -- hardly the doing of the Hindu nationalist government.

The Christian missionary lobby had aptly sensed the
frustration of the India-watchers at seeing the "unexpected" success of
the BJP in maintaining communal peace, hence its initiative to launch an
international slander campaign alleging BJP atrocities against the
Christians. More than ever, they could count on the foreign experts to
amplify their propaganda. The world media consumer was told about the rape
of four nuns and about the killing of a Christian girl and her little
brother "by Hindu fundamentalists"; but not about the subsequent finding
that the culprits had been Christians. Even the murder of Rev. Staines and
his two sons could not definitively be attributed to Hindu activists, but
even if could have been, this would make the death toll of the
"persecution" of Christians in India peanuts compared to the suffering of
Pakistani or Indonesian Christians, not to mention Kashmiri Hindus.

So, undeniably, the Vajpayee government has been a very
responsible one in controlling communal passions. One of the reasons is
that the BJP knew that in case of communal rioting, it would at any rate
be held accountable. Secularist governments, by contrast, can let communal
sores fester and riots escalate, for they know that the blame will always
be put on the BJP (or how false allotment of guilt can aggravate the
crime).

But at least the BJP's "militaristic" policy of nuclear
and missile testing proved its "fascism"? This proposition could only be
discussed with those who have always called the USA, France, England,
Russia and China "fascist" states because of their tested nuclear
capability. But the BJP never started these military projects: India's
first nuclear bomb was tested in 1974 under Indira Gandhi, and the Agni
missile was also inherited from previous governments. What the BJP has
done is to be open and frank about India's status as a nuclear power
¾ which is intrinsically better
for world security than secretive armament policies. The demonstration of
top-notch technological know-how in the tests was less a military than a
geopolitical statement: a clear rejection of the unipolar New World Order.
Nothing fascist about that, but a democratic expression of India's
national will, for military self-reliance is a policy supported by the
vast majority of the Indian people.

Speaking of democracy: a fascist is first and foremost an
opponent of democracy, right? Within his first year of government, Hitler
had passed the first anti-Jewish laws, eliminated some fellow-Nazi rivals
in an orgy of violence (Night of the Long Knives), dissolved all other
political parties, and abolished Parliament. Anyone upholding the equation
"BJP = Nazi" must either show the parallels in Vajpayee's regime, or
withdraw his allegations and apologize. In particular, he will have to
concede that the BJP has by no means threatened or undermined democracy,
on the contrary. The BJP has for twenty years been the only major
political party with a functioning intra-party democracy, quite in
contrast with the autocracy of the Gandhi dynasty in the Congress Party or
the mafia mores of the socialist and regional parties. Under the Emergency
(1975-77), the Hindu nationalists were in the forefront of the struggle
for democracy and against Congress dictatorship. When the Janata coalition
government in which they were the senior partner (like Hitler and
Mussolini in their first governments) lost its majority, they abided by
the rules and stepped down to contest new elections. This time again, they
upheld the democratic traditions.

The BJP also refrained from using the loopholes in the
Constitution to undermine federalism by dismissing state governments at
will, quite unlike Congress practice. Indeed, the BJP even sacrificed its
own government to uphold federalism: it could easily have appeased Mrs.
Jayalalitha by dismissing the Tamil Nadu state government (or by
intervening in the judicial proceedings against her), yet it stuck to its
principles. All in all, the BJP government's fall was unusually honourable:
it was narrowly defeated by a coalition of Communists, separatists (Soz),
criminals (Laloo, Mulayam), dynastic plotters (Sonia and her cronies) and
corrupt politicians fleeing justice (Jayalalitha, possibly Rajiv Bofors's
widow). I used to be skeptical of the BJP's capacity for governance and of
Vajpayee personally, but I must say now that even if the BJP with its
numerous coalition partners has not achieved anything great (unless you
count Pokharan 2 as great), it has refrained from making a number of
predictable mistakes, and it has entirely had nothing to do with the
predicted crimes of a "fascist" nature.

A final question: how come no one among India's
investigative journalists has cared to find out about Sonia Gandhi's
background? Rumour has it that her father was a militant fascist and, in
1943-45, a volunteer in the German army on the eastern front. We should
not judge her own worth by that of her father, nor should we judge his
youthful choices too harshly: fascism was not nearly as murderous or
totalitarian as Nazism, the motivation of East Front soldiers was often
the same as that of the much-decorated Korea volunteers a few years later
(viz. to stop Communism), and it took bravery to volunteer for front duty
in a losing war. But still, if such a biographical detail pertained to a
BJP prime-ministerial candidate, would he and we not be reminded of the
fact every time his name was mentioned? More generally, why are the Indian
and Western media so full of imaginary BJP threats to democracy when their
darling secularist parties have so many anti-democratic skeletons in their
closets?